“Hello, thank you for visiting. Can I help you in any way?” If you’ve browsed our TAA website, you’ve likely seen those words in the chat box that appears on the screen. We’re often asked by visitors if we’re “real”. Then those who realize that we are, and that we are there to help, ask questions that you may have as well.

In this series of “Can I help you in any way?” posts, we’ll highlight some of the questions people have asked through the TAA Live Chat feature of our site and the responses we have for those questions. In this post, we’re focused on questions about strategies for writing academic essays.

Recently one of our visitors stated that they were “trying to research some strategies of a well organized essay” and asked “what examples do think can make an essay to be disorganized?”

In response, I shared “I think an essay appears disorganized if it is lacking a central idea and a logical flow of information to support the idea. Research questions in the introduction can frame the rest of the essay and when the content addresses the initial questions there is alignment. When that flows forward to a logical conclusion, the essay appears organized and well prepared.”

Another visitor was looking for “strategies for writing an essay like tone”. In response to this inquiry, I provided the following resources from our blog archives:

• 5 Rhetorical moves for writing abstracts
• 6 strategies to help you secure “impactful publications”
• Quote or paraphrase? Three tips from a pro

Finally, a third visitor was seeking some insight into scholarly argument topics asking, “what are argument topics that are globally discussed?”

My response to this inquiry was a bit less specific, but I shared the following thoughts:

“I suppose that depends on discipline. Forming scholarly arguments I would consider the following:

• What is the central research problem?
• What questions support that problem?
• How can we effectively design a method for testing a hypothesis?
• What further implications exist after our study is complete?

The general consensus on making some of those decisions is founded in literature review and finding a ‘gap’ in the literature which warrants further research efforts. Again, that becomes a discipline specific item for identifying worth topics.”

Do you have any advice or resources to add to the topic of essay writing? Feel free to add them in the comments below.

Can we help you in other ways? Check out the previous series post on learning objectives.

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Eric Schmieder is the Membership Marketing Manager for TAA. He has taught computer technology concepts to curriculum, continuing education, and corporate training students since 2001. A lifelong learner, teacher, and textbook author, Eric seeks to use technology in ways that improve results in his daily processes and in the lives of those he serves. His latest textbook, Web, Database, and Programming: A foundational approach to data-driven application development using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, MySQL, and PHP, First Edition, is available now through Sentia Publishing.